How to cross promote your Steam games in 2024

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I'm Pascal a Dutch independent game developer since 2004 known as Orangepixel. I created various games including Residual, the Gunslugs series, Heroes of Loot series, Space Grunts series, Stardash and the Meganoid series released on PC, mobile and various consoles.

[@ViktorMartynovsky]

Great video, heathful. Promotion of indie games and marketing in general is one of the most painful things for any indie game developer.

[@GingerCat_Studios]

Yess haha

[@orangepixelgames]

it remains the most painful thing about creating games as a business! :) releasing them and letting people know about it

[@Its_Just_Shane]

That’s a brilliant idea Pascal. I love the idea that even an older game will still show newer games that have become available. Nice move my man.

[@orangepixelgames]

I hope it works !

[@captainnoyaux]

You say your file hosted on your server is not perfect but it's uncoupled and easily maintainable so that's a big win ! I'd show it more than once or add a "later" button though ! Awesome ideas and implementation, thanks for the video !

[@mandisaw]

Yeah, +1 for a "Show me Later" vs "I'm good".

[@orangepixelgames]

I'm still tweaking it a bit, I could easily have a game show up another time by updating the server-side of things.. but also thinking I might only want to show the pop-up after the player had X amount of game sessions.. so that new players don't get distracted on first start 😉

[@captainnoyaux]

@@orangepixelgames Yeah that's a good idea too !

[@GeorgeGameDev]

Steam already announced something like an alternative, you can add your game in the descritpion as long aas they are form the same publisher, and it appears as a "wheel" you can scroll through the games

[@orangepixelgames]

yeah they rolled back something (but that was after I created the video) - but it's not exactly the same "power" we had before.. it's nice.. but it was better!

[@BartMamzer]

I have a few remote settings that allow me to show whatever text I want inside my game and link to whatever website. Used it to funnel players into youtube and steam (from mobile). It works quite well imo and allows for flexibility. Can always disable it if needed.

[@mandisaw]

You're in a good position for cross-promo! Steam seems to be moving more towards helping established devs & publishers, with little support for newer devs with no/small backcatalogs. I've been exploring the idea of updating & rereleasing an old Android-only game just to beef up my Steam [and iOS] Store footprint. Still not sure it's worth the opportunity cost relative to making more progress on my next game, though. Hard to do that math without a crystal ball 🔮 😅

[@orangepixelgames]

I have a few games that aren't on Steam.. mostly because they wouldn't work with the audience there.. I tried it with a few games like Sir Questionnaire which screams "mobile!" and it's mostly because of some peeps requesting it, but it was pretty much a waste of the $100 submission fee 😉

[@mandisaw]

@@orangepixelgames That's good information, actually - thank you! The old game I was considering porting is very "mobile fidget toy". I could pour energy into updating the UI for PC, but nothing really changes its fundamental nature. You just saved me about 2-3mos work :)

[@MysticRiverGames]

great! I will start doing that when I find some time to update my old ones, I didn't think about that at all

[@orangepixelgames]

neither did I ! still in the process of updating older games and refining this system - but luckily it's fairly effortless once the code is written

[@Pewsplosions]

I hate when I open a game, to play that game, and get hit with a pop up telling me about a different game. Not just the annoyance of a pop up, but it also makes me wonder if the dev has given up on this game and is focusing on something else. In contrast, I don't really mind if there is a title screen for the game, that would exist anyway, and somewhere on there is a non-obtrusive ad for another game. Like a dev spotlight/news section. Could even leave it there longer since me dismissing a pop up doesn't necessarily mean I'm not interested in that game, just don't want to see the pop up. But the little section on the title screen being there can stay, so maybe I'm finally finishing up the game I'm playing and it is still there so maybe this time I'll see what it is all about.

[@orangepixelgames]

That's why I do aim to have those pop-ups not appear on a first playsession, but at least wait for that player to open the game for the 3rd time or later. Don't think the pop-up means anything about the dev giving up on the game.. at some point games are simply done and developers HAVE to move on to new games in order to keep existing and make money. But sure: not everyone will like pop-ups! as mentioned in the video, but the pro's probably outweigh the negatives on this one for a developer.

[@williamtucker3700]

Good stuff! Be good to tie it into seasonal or discount marketing. If you are only going to show this to players as a one-off or provide a stop nagging me option, make sure players can get to this information later via the menus eg. the About menu or What is New?

[@orangepixelgames]

Well there is the "more games" link I'm also adding to the game menus, so that's pretty much where they can find the new releases. I do like the seasonal discount stuff.. have to remember that for the next big sale!

[@JakeBirkett]

Yeah we've had a news popup in our games since the start of last year to get wishlists and then sales for our latest game. It only shows once. Then a slide out icon on the title screen. + a more games button. Did get one negative review about advertising, but like, it's advertising OUR OTHER GAMES not something totally unrelated. And we need to do it to survive.

[@orangepixelgames]

I'm sure I'll also receive a negative comment from someone at some point about the pop-up or the title screen "ad space" but I'm fairly confident most people will either just ignore it, or actually check it out! - and as you say, we HAVE to do it, it's one of the few marketing tools we have at our budgets 😅

[@JakeBirkett]

@@orangepixelgames Yep and it does work. Whilst I can't track actually conversions to wishlists and sales, I have tracked clicks. The big popup gets the most clicks, the icon on the title screen 2nd most, and the more games, the least unfortunatley.

[@dancingdoormanable]

I think cross promotion is more beneficial if you're releasing small games more often then big games less often. If you have established a brand the a certain slice of the market likes, it's actually quite helpful for those players. Technically I would have gone for a Xml or Yaml file out of safety reasons. The whole Crowstrike debacle was caused because of a faulty file read, but you're not in the boot sequence of Windows. Doing whatever works is often good enough. There might even be a lib that does this stuff, but good luck finding it. On small conceptual thing for me would be the distinction between the data of the payload of the marketing message and the data of the rules under which to show the message. Those change for different reasons, so I would have separated them. As you pointed out, that sort of nitpicking is probably why I'm a software architect and your a gamedev successfully releasing games. To each it's own I guess.

[@mandisaw]

XML (or YAML) vs CSV [looks like semicolon-delimited here] doesn't make it inherently safer, just allows for more robust validation. The Crowdstrike issue could be argued as a failure to validate input, period. That's a f*ck up, not a poor architectural choice LOL

[@dancingdoormanable]

@@mandisaw Arguing it's just a failure of a dev would be fine if it was just a marketing thing, but it's certainly not in OS boot or kernel space. An architecture decision to use a data format like Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) to serialize structured data, (but designed to be smaller and faster than XML) might have avoided the Crowdstrike disaster. Also the process of delivering critical software should have failsafe's like unit, integration and manual tests and have deployment rings to mitigate the disaster. Those practises are mostly organised by managers not dev's, so blaming a single dev who had a momentary laps in attention, while hurrying a hotfix out the door , is blaming the dev for being human. Shouldn't the people that organised a system that demands superhuman effort share some of the blame?

[@mandisaw]

@dancingdoormanable I said it was a f*ck up, didn't say it was the devs'. Total failure of accepted IT Mgmt & Audit principles, from an architecture that obviously didn't get vetted properly for risk-management, to a CI-CD process that either didn't pass through checkpoints on the way to production, or got rubber-stamped. It's a world-class enterprise, not some garage startup - "people write bad code" is supposed to be accounted for in a documented and actively-enforced software development & review process. Choosing a diff data format doesn't obviate the need for correct change-mgmt & risk-mgmt. The company clearly didn't have those processes in place, and the inevitable happened - it's gonna make a great case study LOL

[@SPG-Games]

Have you ever tried using the cross promotion features in the steam news section? Where you can cross promote announcements for other games? I’ve often wondered how effective that is.

[@orangepixelgames]

yeah used it many times.. doesn't really generate a LOT of wishlist, but it doesn't hurt. But I think even that one is now harder to use due to not being able to link to "other" games.. but not 100% sure it counts for those cross-portfolio announcements

[@SPG-Games]

@@orangepixelgames So specifically the one I'm talking about is "Steamworks > Post Announcements > New Announcement" and right down the bottom is one that says "Cross Promotion", and it says "Use this to post about another game you're making, or another platform your game is coming to." So definitely if you do it there it's encouraged. And you are allowed to link to other games in those news posts. I think they just don't want people doing it in their games store description. I did note it says "This will only be shown to your most engaged fans and in the news feed of followers", so it may be somewhat limited where it gets shown. But it will also go on the store page.

[@RealPeoplePerson]

Players might feel less annoyed with the promotion if it's designed like the back of a NES cartridge case or a page out of a classic games magazine. It would be fun to model a 3D game case that the player can freely rotate to view the front and back of (like you can with items in some RPGs).

[@orangepixelgames]

haha yeah that would look cool, but it also makes things technically a lot more difficult 😉 and the whole idea for this is to have very simple code that works cross various games with specs.

[@GrahamOfLegend]

Perfect topic, perfect timing.... No specific reason 😇🤫

[@orangepixelgames]

new game coming in 3...2... 1! 😎👍

[@CoffeeAI201]

11:10 burn incoming lol

[@chadzulu4328]

Yep! I think he's right though.

[@orangepixelgames]

I could have been a bit more subtle about it .. maybe.. 😏😅

[@orc_spearman]

Do you have any data showing how many users actually click these in-game cross promotions?

[@mandisaw]

Analytics are a must! Even apart from marketing, good to get metrics on how ppl are playing your game.

[@orangepixelgames]

I only added the code end of last week.. so no 😅 but I don't track anything for it either, that would probably require me to follow a lot of rules on privacy and such also 🤔

[@mandisaw]

@@orangepixelgames Not really, you could just track aggregate clickthrough counts - no user-identifying info. Just some basic info to know if it's working as you hope, if players prefer the banners vs popups, etc.

[@BartMamzer]

Popups seem a bit much for my taste. They will work best for sure though.

[@Colorlavie]

HI, no sound between 7:38 and 8:53

[@orangepixelgames]

Hi, use that little volume button or slider or knob.. because there is audio (it is a little bit softer, but it's there!)

[@VforVictorYT]

Steam should have no control of what game features a game have, as long as it is not harmfull or illegal. They are crossing the same line as all monopolistic companies are doing and will be in trubbel like Microsoft, Google and Apple.